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Welcome to this week’s design and development roundup!

Microsoft & Slack were pitted head-to-head this week, with Slack offering some friendly advice in the New York Times ahead of the Microsoft Teams launch. Luckily the only competition in this blog is whether you prefer Lewis' resources or Juma's.

Check out what we've put together for you this week below!

Adam

Free Christmas Icons

Photo: Made by Magnitude

Is this a cop out because it wasn't posted this week? Yes. But I want to refresh your minds with all of the Christmassy goodness we put together in 2014, starting with these free Christmas icons! They're free, so you may as well just download them, right? Or don't. It might be a bit early for that. P.s. We used to be called ALJT Media.

LinkedIn Salary

Photo: LinkedIn

The tagline is "discover your earning potential". Numerous websites have been doing this for a few years, but it's always fun to see a big player throw their cards in the ring too. There's isn't a massive amount of information to work from at the moment, but as time goes on I'm sure they'll be collecting more data to tailor the results even further.

Ruth

Font Awesome

Photo: Font Awesome

If you’re an icon user, you will most likely have been following Font Awesome and their Kickstarter campaign. As of right now, it’s successfully been 1733% funded, with more than 26 days to go. It’s safe to say that FA is the developer's choice of icons, regardless of how slow it can feel for them to push through the thousands of +1's on their forums.

With the October 24th release of 4.6, we finally got to see a shower/bath icon – which has been missing from all of our icon lives, and has resulted in many of us creating an off-the-cuff SVG just to fill the gap. We’ve also been gifted an envelope-open(-o) icon for unread mail, one which I’ve been patiently waiting for myself!

I was in two minds about backing their Kickstarter campaign, as I'm not sure how they’ve gone about it is quite right from an end-user point of view. I can’t accurately say how long it takes to make an icon pack, but from what it seems, they’re pushing for quite large amounts of money to ‘unlock’ new icon packs, which have already been made and are ready to go. Yet we still have a forum of people wanting simple icons such as a coin stack, or any money icon that isn’t a dollar bill or a credit card! (This has been requested since 2013, with not a peep from FA).

I 100% appreciate that they've completely remade their icons from the bottom up, adding so many features which will make our lives better, but while we’re backing (and I did, i’m backer 17127!) maybe they should be a little more vocal on the request side to let us know our 3 year campaign to get a stack of coins has been heard.

Regardless, Font Awesome is an amazing product, one which I go to without hesitation – and I’m curious to see how FA5 manages to listen to its community and push its requests faster for users, who are more than happy to help out with the SVG designing.

Juma

Jasonette

Photo: Jasonette

Jasonette is an app that allows JSON markup to be turned into iOS native components and function calls which can be used to create apps. This allows users to write fully functional applications in JSON.

An app made in Jasonette is stored in the cloud, meaning that the application isn’t stored on the phone. By using the JSON markup language to describe an application's behaviour, Jasonette aims to reduce application development time by circumventing the writing and compiling process. There are some clear use cases where using an app like Jasonette would be deemed advantageous over the more traditional route especially for lightweight applications.

However, when there’s a need to have look under the bonnet, it’s unclear how Jasonette handles debugging.

About the Author

With a passion for all things creative, Adam has been designing for over 5 years, meaning he knows Photoshop and Illustrator inside-out. From web design, to pixel art, to painting and logo design, he’s probably had a go at it. He’ll be the one you’ll be speaking to regarding any design related queries. Outside of work, Adam loves fine art, music and all things internet - you’ll always find him on some social network. Oh, and he loves cats!